Menu

7 Essential Skills You Didn't Learn in College

Like the labor-activist plays of the 1930s, where characters never face any problems that can’t be fixed by joining the Communist Party (or, at least, a union), Wired knows of no problem that can’t be solved by a geeky application of technology.

Students in Seton Hill’s New Media Journalism program are doing pretty well on this list of College 2.0 skills. I teach a statistics unit in my journalism class, and the Griffin Technology Advantage has all full-time students and faculty equipped with new technology. But what do we do with that technology? Wired has some creative suggestions.

Writing today also means mastering metatext, the cues and context that determine how, where, and if your words get read. We’ll learn that winning links depends on appealing to the unique tastes of different social networks. Each link will help you attract your most influential audience–the algorithms that determine where your story ends up in Google’s search results. As we optimize our writing for this cyborg readership, we’ll also learn the new tenets of writing well: Be conspicuous, be entertaining, and leave space for others to talk. —Wired